Jeff Bezos filed the patent last year, but it was just made public last week. Amazon will be selling the airbags for smartphones by October 1st, 2011.

For those with regular cellphones, Amazon will be selling “seatbelts” and “child safety seats” for those who still do not know how to use their cellphones.

Why did Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos feel the need to make airbags for smartphones?

Well, whether it was on the kitchen floor, in the backyard, in the toilet, in your mother-in-law’s chicken gumbo, or even in public – we’ve all dropped our cell phones at some point in our lives.

The old cellphones would just get scratched up, but today we have powerful smartphones that become not-so-powerful after a hard hit to the concrete. One accident can render a $200+ phone completely useless, and without proper insurance, it can cost a bundle to fix. While smartphones (and most other mobile devices) have screen protectors and cases to protect them, there will always be people out there with butterfingers who can push both the case and the phone to its limits.

The Bezos creation consists of tiny airbags that utilize even smaller jet streams within a protective sleeve. The smartphone’s inbuilt motion sensors detect if it is free-falling or just inside a bag, and if it senses a catastrophic situation ahead, an emergency signal is sent to the protective sleeve which deploys the airbags prior to contact.

In addition, the patent mentions a spring-loaded system help deter severe damage to the phone, and could even be used to flip the phone onto the airbags.

Here’s the patented design for the airbags:

And here’s Amazon’s original design:

The “seatbelts” for older cellphones are just simply a “bungee-type” belt that attaches the phone to your belt. When you drop it, it springs back into your pocket.

The “child safety seat” merely is a voice-activated alarm that says, “Give this phone to someone who is not a moron!”